Abstract
Irreversible coma caused by the destruction of the whole brain has gained wide acceptance as an alternative to the traditional heart/lung approach to defining death. Robert Veatch has proposed an “updating” of the whole brain criteria to allow destruction of the neo-cortex alone to indicate the death of the person. This paper examines Veatch's definition of death, and its application to persons. Veatch's argument that a person is dead when he has irreversibly lost the capacities for conscious experience and social interaction confuses the criteria by which we determine that something is a person with the meaning of being a person. In so doing, it begs an important question: the relationship between the person and his body. Until that issue is resolved, the safer (and therefore morally preferable) course is to use the more stringent whole brain criteria for deciding when death has occurred.
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